It is life's small moments that create lasting memories. As the official blog of "Crowdsourcing A Good Life", the goal of this blog is to enable a life-milieu conducive to creating and commemorating these small moments.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Jersey Exchange.

I was out and about Sunday. Pro football ceases to exist once the Bears are eliminated from the playoffs. In many years, pro football ceases to exist as Thanksgiving concludes. As I was tooling around town, I was listening to the recap of football playoff games that don't exist. The commentator from the four letter network was analyzing an exchange between Arian Foster (RB, Houston) of the Texans and Ray Lewis (LB, Baltimore) of the Ravens.

source: benchwarmerblues

After the game ended, Lewis and Foster autographed and exchanged their game jerseys. The radio talking head expounded on "sense of history of the game, two warriors, good friends, blah, blah, blah...". I guess it's hard to kill 6 hours on radio when you don't take phone calls.

I have nothing against Ray Lewis (except he doesn't play for the Bears) or Arian Foster (except he doesn't play for the Bears). Both men are well skilled and well compensated. Both men are amongst the best at there position. Their exchange of jerseys is a nice gesture but nothing more. Their jersey exchange is the same as two mid-level managers (as common as pro athletes these days) trading pencil cups at a trade show. If Lewis and Foster exchanged autographed jerseys for a charity auction, now that's something great.

I am an avid fan of pro sports. It's time pro sports be placed in proper perspective, even on networks that cover athletics.
.

2 comments:

How much are these "middle managers" paid? Their "celebrity" is proportional to the value our society places on males, brawn, and the often-times brutal sport of football. I would love to see football and other exalted male sports programs having to hold bake sales and book sales to try to fund their programs, and child care and special needs “middle managers” be paid millions of dollars for the challenging work of caring for and educating the youngest members of our society. Ya think?

Pro athletes are paid as entertainers. Unfortunately entertainers and pro athletes are given way too much adoration for what some of them contribute to society. It's not the fault of entertainers or athletes that they make boatloads of money: I wouldn't turn down the paycheck if someone offered me that kind of dough. I hope I wouldn't gain the sense of entitlement that many of the fore mentioned wealthy have. I would like to see teachers get a pay bump, but how many citizens are willing to take the tax hit to raise teacher pay? It's easier to make your grandkids pay more taxes to build prisons. Two final notes: The exalted male sports programs in college (as dirty as all of them are) subsidize many other non-revenue sports including most women's athletics programs. I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water. Finally, Good to see your handle again, Vena. Hope you had a Happy New Year and things are well for your family.

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe To

Follow by Email

Followers

Networked Blogs

Add this Thumbnail List to your blog and share links with your visitors and friends. Blog Links will do all the work and keep it up. You can grab this code (Here). This is a Free service that lets you add your Thumbnail Link to multiple blog sites.

By submitting your Thumbnail Link you agree to the following rules:
We do require a Button Link back to us from somewhere on the site that you are submitting.

Please do not use ALL CAPS in your titles or descriptions.
Please only submit sites that are in the English language.
Sites that contain illegal content will not be accepted into our Thumbnail Links.
Sites that contain adult material will not be accepted into our Thumbnail Links.OUR LINK BACK BUTTONS